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How does one learn nonviolent resistance? The same way that Martin Luther King Jr. did—by study, reading and interrogating seasoned tutors. King would eventually become the person most responsible for advancing and popularizing Gandhi’s ideas in the United States, by persuading black Americans to adapt the strategies used against British imperialism in India to their own struggles. Yet he was not the first to bring this knowledge from the subcontinent.

By the 1930s and 1940s, via ocean voyages and propeller airplanes, a constant flow of prominent black leaders were traveling to India. College presidents, professors, pastors and journalists journeyed to India to meet Gandhi and study how to forge mass struggle with nonviolent means. Returning to the United States, they wrote articles, preached, lectured and passed key documents from hand to hand for study by other black leaders. Historian Sudarshan Kapur has shown that the ideas of Gandhi were moving vigorously from India to the United States at that time, and the African American news media reported on the Indian independence struggle. Leaders in the black community talked about a “black Gandhi” for the United States. One woman called it “raising up a prophet,” which Kapur used as the title of his book.

While a student at Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, King was intrigued by reading Thoreau and Gandhi, yet had not actually studied Gandhi in depth. A friend, J. Pius Barbour, remembered the young seminarian arguing on behalf of Gandhian methods with a reckoning based on arithmetic—that any minority would be outnumbered if it turned to a policy of violence—rather than on principle.

The more that King read Gandhi, though, the less he doubted the validity of a philosophy based on “Love,” which in turn was central to his preparation for the Christian ministry. “As I delved deeper into the philosophy of Gandhi,” he later wrote, “my skepticism concerning the power of Love gradually diminished, and I came to see for the first time its potency in the area of social reform.” His serious contemplation of Gandhi’s fundamental approaches for organizing a movement began in Montgomery, soon after becoming pastor at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in April of 1954.

When Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to yield her seat on a public bus to a white man on December 1, 1955, JoAnn Robinson, a leader in the Women’s Political Council, worked through the night to organize an action of mass economic noncooperation. King was unanimously elected to lead the Montgomery Improvement Association, which would sustain the boycott of city buses.

With the start of the Montgomery boycott, a number of activists, pacifists, reformers, radical Christians and socialists arrived in town. Elated by King, they believed that he could take the fight for justice to a new order of magnitude unlike anything the United States had seen since the abolition of slavery. Among them was 44-year-old Bayard Rustin, 17 years King’s senior, who went on to help King build the Montgomery boycott into a mature campaign. The War Resisters League let Rustin work for King full-time for this assignment.

The black community in Montgomery, as elsewhere in the South, was armed, and there was concern that it could turn to violence in the struggle. Rustin was worried that King himself might falter without deeper foundations. Plying him with books at night, he helped him to analyze Gandhi, and was the first tutor to teach King the essentials of nonviolent struggle systematically.

The boycott’s success—recognized when the Supreme Court ruled on November 13, 1956, that local laws obliging segregation on buses were unconstitutional—raised hopes for comparable abolition of other discriminatory practices in the South. That the U.S. civil rights movement of the 1960s would be based on Gandhian strategic nonviolent action partly resulted from the success of the Alabama city’s exquisitely unified black community. “While the Montgomery boycott was going on,” King said, “India’s Gandhi was the guiding light of our technique of nonviolent social change.”

In February 1957, at Oberlin College in Ohio, King met a black Methodist minister named James M. Lawson, Jr. Lawson had served 13 months in U.S. federal prison for refusing to cooperate with conscription during the Korean War. While locked up, the Board of Missions of the Methodist Church successfully petitioned the court for Lawson to be handed over to them. They assigned him to teach at Hislop College in Nagpur, India. Arriving there four years after Gandhi’s death, he spent the next three years teaching. He also met numerous individuals who had worked with Gandhi and learned of the Indian campaigns firsthand from participants. King was impressed by Lawson’s background and experience, especially considering they were both just 28 years old. He asked Lawson not to wait to finish his studies to come South: “Come now! You’re badly needed. We don’t have anyone like you!” As I have documented elsewhere, Lawson became a human bridge, connecting knowledge from India to the fledgling U.S. civil rights movement and contemporary struggles.

James Lawson and Martin Luther King during the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Strike. Photo by Jack E. Cantrell.

After Lawson met King in 1957, he contacted A. J. Muste, a foremost Christian pacifist then still at the helm of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Muste offered Lawson the position of southern field secretary of FOR, and by January 1958, Lawson was settled in Nashville. Upon arrival, he discovered that the Reverend Glenn Smiley, another of King’s tutors and national field director of FOR, had arranged for Lawson to conduct a full schedule of workshops—including one arranged for early that year at the first annual meeting of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in Columbia, South Carolina. There, King enthusiastically introduced Lawson. “Be back promptly at 2:00 p.m.,” he declared, “for Brother Lawson’s workshop on nonviolence!” Before the agreed time, King seated himself in the first pew, waiting attentively for the three-hour session to start. Lawson once recalled in an interview with me:

Martin did that at every SCLC meeting as long as he lived. He would ask me to conduct an afternoon workshop, usually two or three hours, and he would arrange for it to be “at-large” so that everyone could attend, with nothing else to compete. He put it on the schedule himself. A few minutes early, he would show up and sit alone, as an example, in the front row.

In Nashville, throughout the autumn of 1959, Lawson led weekly Monday-evening meetings in which he and interested students analyzed the theories and techniques that he had encountered in India. His workshops scrutinized the Bible, and writings of Gandhi, King and Thoreau. They practiced test-cases, including small sit-ins. Lawson’s workshops lasted for several months before news broke on February 1, 1960, of the Greensboro sit-ins. Hearing of the Greensboro actions, seventy-five Nashville students followed suit, creating the largest, most disciplined and influential of the 1960 sit-in campaigns. In working with Lawson—who was always calm and self-effacing—the Nashville students were not only being trained by one of King’s own instructors, but they were benefitting from direct acquaintance with Gandhi’s experiments. The sit-ins would give the overall movement its regional reach, and the Nashville students would become a cornerstone of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, of which I was a part.

In commemorating Dr. King’s birthday, it is worth remembering that everyone can learn nonviolent action as he did. King may not have invented the nonviolent strategies that he advanced, but he was an apt student, and his understanding of them would in the decades to come encourage other movements on the world stage. He became one of history’s most influential agents for propagating knowledge of the potential for constructive social change without resorting to violence. How he himself learned the theory and practice of civil resistance is a reminder to each of us that these methods are neither intuitive nor spontaneous; they’re a system of logic, skills and techniques that must be learned.

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“How he himself learned the theory and practice of civil resistance is a reminder to each of us that these methods are neither intuitive nor spontaneous; they’re a system of logic, skills and techniques that must be learned.”

Would you say that the methods function independently of “the power of Love”?

I would usually refer to both King’s methods and a clearly spontaneous action like the defusing of a violent conflict in Terry Dobson’s “Aikido in Action” (http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC04/Dobson.htm) as nonviolence. Are they not actually the same sort of thing at all?

It seems to me that the passage in which Mary King refers to MLK’s conversion toward the concept of love in Gandhian nonviolence suggests that it is integrally connected with the “logic, skills and techniques that must be learned.” Right?

In 1956, having learned only the rudiments of nonviolent struggle, King was already thinking globally:
“There is another method which can serve as an alternative to the method of violence, and it is a method of nonviolent resistance. This is an important method, a significant method, and it is a method that I would like to recommend. A method that all of the oppressed peoples of the world must use if justice is to be achieved in a proper sense. There are several basic things that we can say about this method of nonviolent resistance, this technique of nonviolence. . . . [I]t is not a method of submission or surrender. And there are those who would argue that this method leads to stagnant complacency and deadening passivity, and so it is not a proper method to use. But that is not true of the nonviolent method. . . .[I]t is not a method of surrender, or a weapon, or a method of submission, but it is a method that is very active in seeking to change conditions. . . . “

King’s application of agape Love is something about which I have written in detail in my book Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr: The Power of Nonviolent Action (UNESCO 1999; Mehta Publishers, New Delhi, 2002) and requires too much length to go into here. It is, however, important to realize that while the terminology is contested, the selection of nonviolent means in pursuit of political and social goals is the technique’s core characteristic. The word “nonviolence” is paricularly ambiguous and multifaceted. Strong arguments have been made against its use without a qualifier, because it may suggest a creed, faith, or belief system. Ethical, normative, religious, and spiritual principles are often implied, yet not necessarily required. In building a movement, one needs the largest, broadest range of participation possible. So using terms like nonviolent action, nonviolent struggle, or, increasingly, civil resistance are favored because they desrcibe the type of action involved. Gene Sharp in Waging Nonviolent Struggle (2005, pp. 20-21) puts it this way: “The use of ‘nonviolence’ is especially unfortunate, because it confuses . . . forms of mass action with beliefs in ethical or religious nonviolence. . . . usually unrelated to mass struggles conducted by people who do not share [ethical or religious] beliefs.” Numbers count, so one would not want to exclude anyone.

Dr. Martin Luther King took nonviolent direct action to a new level. He successfully applied the tactics of nonviolence of Gandhi to civil rights and brought it to a new level. Two of his followers, who help organize and train sit-ins, marches, Freedom Riders, voter registration, boycotts and strikes, have written about their adaption of both Gandhi and King to the struggles of civil rights, workers rights, union organizing rights, environmental pollution, stopping nuclear energy and war. Their names are George Lakey and Bill Moyer(not the PBS guy. Unfortunately, Bill Moyer died from cancer in 2007 but George Lakey is still researching writing , organizing, teaching, training and advocating for nonviolent revolution. His 5 Stage Strategic Framework for Nonviolent Revolution in three books and numerous articles in alternative publications such as WIN magazine, CommonDreams and other publications such as the New York Times, Sojouners,and History is a Weapon.org. He is Director Ameritus of Training for Change and a Visiting Professor at Swarthmore College in the Peace and Conflict Studies Program and a organizer of the Earth Quaker Action Team protesting mountain top removal for the extraction of coal.

Bill Moyer’s final book, “Doing Democracy: The Map Model of Building Nonviolent Direction Action Campaigns and Movements was published just before he died in 2007. He has published numerous articles, manuals and pamphlets on nonviolent direct action and training for such activity. He has an article on the MAP Model at the history isaweapon.org site.

Lakey has set up a Global Nonviolent Action Database at Swarthmore College which has over 600 of nonviolent direct action throughout history as defined by Gene Sharp. Sharp has defined 198 different methods of nonviolent direct action

Indeed, these are two very strong contributors. Thank you for noting some of their specific contributions. Often overlooked is the fact that Lakey’s master’s degree thesis, published in 1968 as “The Sociological Mechanisms of Nonviolent Action,” in Peace Research Review, is the basis for work in developing theory on the Mechanisms of Change, which help us to understand how nonviolent action can be aimed, or how it may retroactively be explained. And in the succeeding years he has continued at high accleration to contribute.

I’m hoping that this is just part I of a most fascinating and informative look at MLK’s “learning” of nonviolence. I’m particularly interested in the Freedom Riders and how this impacted his understanding of nonviolent strategy and tactics. Why did he not accompany the initial Freedom Riders on the fateful buses from Atlanta to Birmingham? And later after events in Montgomery, why he did not ride with them to Mississippi? How did Dr. King’s views on nonviolence mature in connection with the poor people’s campaign, Resurrection City, and his role in the Vietnam anti-war movement? Please, we want to know how this story ends, even though we know his struggle for peace, justice and equality goes on.

After reading Professor Elizabeth King’s article, that was cross published on CommonDreams, I shared with us my effort at creating a movement of nonviolence and change. Prof. King asked me to share my project with you on her blog, and I gladly comply.

The Science of peace… Peace research… That’s what has been the subject of my past 3 years, sunken into the trenches of the collective consciousness, which doesn’t always respond to reason, these days, and may be rather aroused by very unexpected things, like products, ideas, fantasies.

At 45 I reached the threshold of feeling hopeless, and refused to fall into apathy and cynicism. I knew that alone I wasn’t going to be able to change the world, but only by finding ways to empower others, by awakening the collective in the only form of actions that are legitimate for a peaceful movement. I had 3 skills and gifts handy for taking my shot at changing the world. One is a degree in Social Psychology, one is a degree in Fine Arts, and one is a stubborn and deeply intense refusal to accept injustice. This is also my world and What they’re doing to it stinks, and I will not take it anymore.

If you will take the time to visit my site or google repeace or repeace.com you will find what I did. I took all the anger and all the frustration and I re-powered peace… and, while I was at it, I found out that the act of realizing peace has always existed. It is now in Egypt, Greece, Spain and now rising in the USA. I am not good at making elevator pitches, and I could go on and on, trying to explain something very simple.

I have been thinking and researching on peace, love, and finding ways to mobilize nonviolent resistance, adapted to our culture and our time, which is very important. As my repeace project has extensively revisited the concept of peace, my mind and heart has been visited by the meaning of love, and how society can be pragmatically be mobilized by something that promotes love, as I found something that promotes peace. It is no coincidence that the spirits of JFK, MLK, Gandhi, and some of the most famous quotes in history are now being echoed and reposted on Facebook, on digital images, on Youtube videos, or on card boards at Occupy events. The renaissance is here and is taking shape. I see it clearly, but it has to be pulled out of her cocoon.

Love, this ethereal and elusive concept is misunderstood, as it is peace. I think of empathy, compassion and sharing, as the elements that build the foundation of the ability to love, maybe then…yes..in a relationship. I believe that divisiveness, hatred, fear instilled mistrust, religious fear mongering, Taoistic religion views (“our God is the one, the sole worthy of worship”), cultural customs to raise men who don’t cry, and repression of women, abuse, etc. Are all welcome tools of a society who feeds and profits from the byproducts of hatred and fear, who produces humans unable to feel empathy, and replace the soul based feeling, with the cognitive perceptual experience of pleasure by witnessing extreme forms of pain, abuse, violence, by others, or inflicted by own actions.
Punishment of citizens who feed the poor (article in New Orleans), arrest of a priest at OWS events, just to name a few, are government acts of intimidation, ultimately part of the bigger picture of the clear plan, of extinguishing our instinct to help and care, share, love.
This instinct, this underlying and still overwhelmingly ever present empathy is reaching a boil, waiting for the catalyst idea that wil allow us to realize how much we’re equal and similar, before we’re different. The perversion that has allowed political strategies and corporate funds to abuse the foundations of religions for political expedient, and the praise and justification of war and collateral casualties for some arguments that have by know crumbled to pieces, stand now like pathetic spectacles of emptiness. These are the times to challenge the basic functions of religions and appeal to the human need to care and share, that is starved for love, for laughter and peace.

I appreciate your emphasis on how all of us can learn strategic nonviolent action. It should also be pointed out that King was reluctant at first to join the ministerial alliance to back the boycott, but E. D. Nixon, among others, pressured him into it.

When I read in your essay that, “The boycott’s success—recognized when the Supreme Court ruled on November 13, 1956…” it didn’t sound right to me, because I remembered that the boycott lasted a little over a year, and it hadn’t begun until early December 1955.

You are right, the Court did rule on the case of Browder v. Gale on November 13 (see http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/encyclopedia/encyclopedia/enc_browder_v_gayle/), but the city and state tried to get the Supreme Court to reconsider. It was the court’s rejection of that motion, on December 17, 1956, that led directly to the desegregation agreement between the bus line and the MIA that led to the famous first legally integrated bus ride in Montgomery on December 20, 1956.

The Browder Supreme Court decision came in the nick of time, because the city was cracking down on the MIA’s carpools (utilized based on the experience of the Baton Rouge, LA bus boycott of 1953), by claiming they were an illegal taxi service, thus jeopardizing the MIA’s ability to continue the boycott. And the decision itself, it should be pointed out, was partially an outgrowth of the NAACP’s multi-decade campaign (see http://journals.chapman.edu/ojs/index.php/VocesNovae/article/view/200/546), partially led by Thurgood Marshall, to build a legal case for overturning segregation in schools and beyond.

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